Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu has asked the federal and state governments to invest in vocational training and skill acquisition programmes in order to meaningfully engage the youths and reduce the unemployment rate.

Speaking at the inauguration of a vocational training institute, ‘Learn and Work European Vocational School”, Senator Ekweremadu said the unemployment rate had remained high because of the failure of government to come up with progressive and pragmatic strategies to resolving the challenge.

The school is designed to train young people in different skills including web design, plumbing, tailoring/dress making, and home nursing among others. The training is packaged to last for six months or 320 hours after which graduates are presented with
certificates.

The institute, which has Ekweremadu as its promoter is being managed by the CEPU Education Group, Italy.

The lawmaker decried a situation where the nation’s tertiary institutions graduate thousands of ‘unemployable people’ annually, noting that the vocational training school had been packaged to fill the yawning gap in the system.

“It’s really unfortunate that we have engineers, technicians and plumbers that cannot construct or fix anything.”He expressed optimism that the institution would in the next five years effectively address the problem of unemployment as those who pass through the school would not only be meaningfully engaged but their minds taken away from crimes and unnecessary agitations.

According to him, after six months, those who graduate from the institute will be encouraged to access soft loans from the Bank of Industry (BOI) to set up their own businesses in order to become self-reliant and employers of labour.

“We must come to terms with the fact that government alone cannot solve our problems. Civil and public services cannot provide jobs for our teeming populace. We must invest in vocational training otherwise, in the next 50 years, the nation will be in a serious problem,” he said.